Bursting out from behind the main wall of their camp, the mages took up position behind a crenelated half-wall further in, while the two spellblades ran out front. They were as prepared for a fight as they possibly could have been.

  Coming from the left passage, an enormous monster shambled toward the party. The creature appeared to be a mismatched collection of ever-shifting bones almost as tall as the cavern itself. It crawled about on four legs with far too many joints, the last segment of which looked more like an elephant’s rib than a tibia. It swung a pair of scythe-like arms about, made from inhumanly long scapulae. The only thing normal about it was its human skull, though it wore a troll pelvis for a crown, palisaded with serrated fangs from various carnivorous monsters. Two wicked vertebral tails tipped with spikes swayed behind it as it slowly approached the group.

  “An osteomorph…” Lerrum muttered. “Guess that means this labyrinth is probably crawling with undead.”

  The monster’s countless bones clinked together as loudly as Evran’s rattlestones did when it stumbled through them. It twitched with sharp, unnatural movements upon hearing the alarm, then fell completely still.

  Evran held his staff at the ready, sizing up the terrible creature. It was made of bones, so earth magic was likely effective here. Those sudden movements just now betrayed its true capacity for speed. It was far faster than it appeared, and Evran would need to do something about that.

  Lerrum let out a fierce war cry and launched a series of stone shards at the monster. Kaila immediately did the same. Though not her preferred element, she knew stone would be more effective than ice in this case. All three mages were in perfect agreement regarding the element with which to attack a creature made of bone.

  The stone shards shot through the cavern and impacted against the osteomorph. Splinters of bone exploded from the creature, and a few large chunks fell to the cavern floor with a dull clang. The attacks weren’t as effective as Evran had hoped, but they were damaging the monster.

  The osteomorph roared to life once more, filling the cavern with its own terrible cry. Then it launched itself at the students. However, Evran was ready for it. Before the monster got too far, Evran transformed the ground in front of it into a quagmire of thick, viscous mud. Its reckless charge sent it hurtling into the morass, causing it to get stuck.

  Evran left a ring of solid ground around the creature from which the spellblades could strike. Between the unrelenting hail of stone shards from the mages, Narro and Indon dashed down the corridor and began an attack of their own.

  The osteomorph struggled in vain, only churning itself deeper into the mud. But the monster was still a deadly threat. Narro struck first, enhancing the cutting prowess of his blade with wind magic. He circled around to the right and attacked the monster’s left forward leg, hoping to further immobilize the creature. Sadly, the blade bounced off the hardened rib it used to walk on. He’d only managed a small chip for his effort.

  More stone shards flew across the cavern, blasting off bits of bone where they struck. The creature, having sunk into the muddy floor a bit, left a larger opening between its head and the cavern roof. Indon leapt over the osteomorph, hoping to land a critical strike on the monster’s head with his new sword. The blade met bone, and the beastkin’s attack cleaved off a small portion of the monster’s skeletal crown.

  Any advantage Indon had expected to gain by attacking from above was rendered meaningless when the scythe-like scapula rotated about its joint, facing upwards at an unnatural angle. The creature had no magical facsimiles of flesh and tendon limiting its range of motion the way normal skeleton monsters did. Its bones moved freely. The osteomorph swung its razor sharp arm at Indon, who had not anticipated a counterattack from that angle. He barely managed to block it in time, but the power behind the attack sent him crashing into the cavern wall.

  “I got it!” cried Kaila, casting a healing spell on her injured companion.

  Brushing the bloodied dirt from his sealed cuts and scraps, Indon nodded a thanks to his healer and resumed his attacks. The students were slowly chipping away at the vicious osteomorph, which struggled to regain its footing on solid ground. Still, the monster was incredibly dangerous and able to move its upper body in logic-defying ways. Their first mistake was a costly one.

  Narro came in for a risky attack on an interior joint of its rear right leg. He made a solid hit, severing the limb from the body, but just as he did, the osteomorph twisted its whole body around. With his right arm still outstretched from his attack, he desperately tried to block the incoming strike with the sword held in his left. He was expecting only a broken arm or two, which could easily be fixed with his teammate’s healing magic. Instead, something unexpected happened.

  The osteomorph’s scythe-like arm cut itself on the edge of the blade Narro used to block the attack. The severed end of the scapula flew off and struck Narro in the head. Without the full weight of the monster behind the blade anymore, the sharpened bone only left a horrible laceration across the side of his head as it bounced off.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it. The bottom half of the scapula, the part still attached to the osteomorph, continued on unblocked. It caught Narro’s right arm at the elbow joint between a gap in his armor. It cut through the boy’s flesh with ease. Narro’s severed forearm fell to the cavern floor, still gripping its sword. He screamed in pain, tumbling back and away from the monster’s follow-up attack.

  “Damn it, already?” Evran shouted, then ran over to help Narro. In shock but seeing help on the way, Narro ran over to meet Evran while the others kept the monster busy. Evran reached into his belt and pulled out a scroll. The complex spell inscribed upon it was well beyond his capacity to cast yet, but that didn’t matter. The scroll would do the intricate control work for him. He just needed to supply it with mana, and for this one in particular, quite a lot of it.

  He activated the scroll. Evran could feel the incredible healing power flowing from his hand over to his friend’s grievous injury. As the scroll burned to ash, a new forearm grew from Narro’s wounded stump. Smiling in relief, he gave Evran a thumbs up with his new, slightly less-tanned hand, then returned to the fray.

  Narro’s temporary sacrifice had not been in vain. The osteomorph was far less mobile now that it was down to three legs. Lerrum and Kaila were concentrating their attacks on that side’s foreleg, hoping to bring the creature down completely. With the creature unable to maneuver, the damage on that leg began to accumulate.

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  Then it broke. Both of the osteomorph’s right legs had been destroyed, and the wounded monster crashed into the quagmire, unable to move at all. The three mages moved in closer, all the while pelting the creature’s skull with stone shards. It tried in vain to block with its remaining arm, but that, too, shattered under the relentless assault.

  Lerrum poured most of his remaining mana into a final attack. He cast two simultaneous stone lances toward the monster’s skull, a blunt one from beneath and a sharp one from the ceiling. The blunt lance struck first, pushing the osteomorph’s skull up right where the ceiling lance would land. The sharpened rock pierced the monster’s crown and sent shards of the skull off in every direction. What bones remained all fell into a disorganized heap, as if nothing had held them together to begin with. The fight was over.

  Kaila blasted the pile of bones with a fireball, scattering burning bones all over. A few of them struck her friends, though she offered little apology. Instead, she wandered about setting fire to any large chunks of bone she found. Could she really afford to be so wasteful within a labyrinth of all places?

  “I’m sorry, Evran,” said Lerrum, out of breath. He looked completely exhausted after the fight. “I never really understood until now.”

  “To be honest, even I wasn’t expecting to fight something this strong only on the first layer. I don’t think it’s a normal monster.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Kaila, returning from her crusade.

  “Certain types of guardians have special monsters they send out to hunt down intruders. A creature like this suggests that we’re dealing with a necromancer of some sort, perhaps a lich.”

  “Wait, if it made it this far, does that mean it killed the adventurers?” Indon inquired nervously.

  “Not necessarily,” said Evran. “Labyrinths are quite large. They could have missed each other, or maybe the adventurers were in a safe zone. I doubt they would have lost against our friend here.”

  “They are as good as dead, though, aren’t they?” lamented Lerrum. “They have no idea what’s waiting for them once they leave this place.”

  He had a point. After defeating the guardian, the adventurers would eventually leave the labyrinth to return to camp. Then, the dragon would take them unaware. The students could journey through the labyrinth and try to warn them, but given how strong the monster they’d just fought was, none were willing to take the risk.

  “We should get some rest and recover our strength,” said Kaila, somewhat hypocritically given the mana she’d wasted on burning the bones. “I doubt our fighting is over.”

  Everyone returned to the camp, save Evran and Narro. Evran needed to rearm his noise trap, while Narro had more morbid business to attend to. There were bone shards everywhere, scattered from all the fighting. Kaila had turned the largest of them to ash, but she lacked the mana to destroy every last scrap. It was no issue, though. It’d dissolve into miasma soon enough.

  After resetting the rattlestones, Evran cleaned up Lerrum’s stone lances, returning their mass to the floor and ceiling. Whoever was on watch next could see down the tunnel now. He figured he might as well clean up the mud, too. Aside from the bone fragments, Evran had returned the cavern to how it looked before the fight. His tasks complete, Evran went to see how his friend was faring. Narro sat on the cavern floor, eyes moving back and forth from his severed hand to his new one.

  “First time?” Evran asked.

  “My callouses and scars… they’re just gone. And my freckles moved. Is this really my hand, Ev?” he asked, staring at his new one.

  “My right foot is the only limb I was born with,” he replied, wiggling it at Narro. “The rest are just as real as your new hand.”

  “Damn, how’d you lose so many?”

  “When I was a kid, I told my father I wanted to be an adventurer. He smiled, then he took me outside for training. I was so excited. First thing he did was lop my right arm off in a sparring match.” Evran laughed. “He healed it right away, but Mother was livid with him when she found out.”

  “Whoa, I had no idea your old man was so strict.” Narro picked up his severed hand and began removing the bracer still attached to it. He’d already taken his sword from its grip and sheathed it.

  “I think he was trying to dissuade me from my choice. It didn’t work. If anything, learning that I could recover from losing a limb made me feel invincible back then. It made me do reckless things.”

  “Well, thanks for healing my hand. I’m quite useless without it.”

  “Anytime! Well, not any time. That was the only such scroll I had, and all my materials for making more were back in camp.”

  Having finished removing the bracer, Narro tossed his naked hand to the cavern floor and strapped the bracer onto his new one.

  “Now’s not the best time for a duel, buddy,” Evran joked.

  Narro rolled his eyes and cast a flare at his discarded hand, burning it to ash just as Kaila had done with the many bones surrounding them. Smirking, he lightly punched Evran in the shoulder with his new fist, then walked back to the campsite.

  With everyone else having returned, that left Evran to watch the tunnel. He wandered back to the post Kaila made and sat on the crude bench within, exhausted. Though only mid-afternoon, Evran felt as though he’d been awake for days. He fought the urge to make his seat a bit more comfortable, needing to conserve his mana. Instead, he meditated on his horrible predicament.

  If the Glory of Aldea had managed to send off a pigeon, it might arrive back on Aldea sometime during the night. There might not be many adventurers in town, but with the island’s reputation on the line, not to mention a sizable portion of its economy, they would doubtless send out a team of their own knights to slay the dragon. Rescue would come in as little as three days, given good wind and weather.

  But if there was no pigeon, and if the ship fell, what then? A single scout ship might arrive a week later to find out what happened, only for the dragon to take that out as well. By the time they even learn about the beast, weeks may have passed. Would they still send a rescue after all that time? Of course they would. As much as they are feared, dragons are also coveted for their body parts. Scales, fangs, claws, horns, hide… even its meat is highly valued, to say nothing of its heart. Professor Merrilus was right; rescue would come, but would anyone still be alive when it did?

  Evran had lost all track of time. He hadn’t noticed any change in the light, though with Kaila’s walls meant to block just that, he couldn’t be sure if the sun had already set or not. Still, Evran was quite sure of one thing. It was someone else’s turn to watch the tunnel.

  He took one last glance down the tunnel to make sure nothing was there before dipping behind the wall that led to camp. Though only a few meters away, the place had been awfully quiet during his watch. He soon realized why. Everyone else was asleep, tired from all the running and fighting. Only Indon remained awake, dooming the beastkin to take Evran’s place at the watch post.

  “Don’t hesitate to call for help if you need it,” said Evran.

  Indon nodded, swapping places with Evran. With nothing else to do, he wandered to the front of the camp to see what time of day it was. Much to Evran’s surprise, it was still quite bright outside. He hadn’t spent nearly as much time on watch duty as he’d thought. Nothing he could do about it now, though.

  Tired, Evran returned to the camp to get some sleep. It would be at least three days before they were rescued, and he wanted to spend as much of that time unconscious as possible.

  After a bit of searching, he finally found his missing pack. Kaila had taken it into her cell and was using it as a pillow. Curse that girl! She was even drooling on it. Still, she looked kind of cute, despite her disheveled appearance. Evran wondered if whatever it was that allowed her to sense his aurasight would wake her up if he used it now. He decided not to risk it.

  Seeing the cell next to hers was empty, Evran took off his cloak and rolled into a pillow of his own. He’d have rather used it as a blanket, but circumstances had left them with few resources. He’d have to make do. They all would. Evran quickly succumbed to the embrace of sleep. His fleeting dreams were as pleasant as they were brief. The distinct metallic chime of his rattlestone trap roused him from his slumber.